I've been arguing with friends and am interested in how other climbers define benighted. Webster says something like being overtaken by darkness.

From a climbing perspective are you benighted if:

#1 Unplanned - you are on the 5th pitch of a six pitch climb, when darkness hits. You top out with headlamps and in epic fashion, take two hours to scramble back to your gear and another two to find your car when it should have taken only an hour from the top out to the car? If not, how many hours do you have to be out in darkness to qualify for a benighting?

I've been arguing with friends and am interested in how other climbers define benighted. Webster says something like being overtaken by darkness.

From a climbing perspective are you benighted if:

#1 Unplanned - you are on the 5th pitch of a six pitch climb, when darkness hits. You top out with headlamps and in epic fashion, take two hours to scramble back to your gear and another two to find your car when it should have taken only an hour from the top out to the car? If not, how many hours do you have to be out in darkness to qualify for a benighting?

#2 You must, unplanned spend all night out and see the sun come up?

#3 You spend all night out and require rescue?

#4 All of the above

This is a case where creating a poll would have served you better.

I can't say that I have given it much thought, but I guess to me it means spending the entire (unplanned) night out.

Hiking out by the headlamp doesn't count, and rescue is not required, either.

The dictionary definition of "benighted" simply means being overtaken by night. There is nothing in the definition about it being unplanned, the duration, or spending the entire night out.

That might be, but I've never heard anyone use the term "benighted" in a climbing context to describe a situation where they a)planned to climb in the dark or b) got caught in the dark and climbed their way out of it that night. Have you? I wouldn't use the word if I was just climbing in the dark or if I just returned after dark. To me, in a climbing context, it implies something more than its dictionary definition.

I've been arguing with friends and am interested in how other climbers define benighted. Webster says something like being overtaken by darkness.

From a climbing perspective are you benighted if:

#1 Unplanned - you are on the 5th pitch of a six pitch climb, when darkness hits. You top out with headlamps and in epic fashion, take two hours to scramble back to your gear and another two to find your car when it should have taken only an hour from the top out to the car? If not, how many hours do you have to be out in darkness to qualify for a benighting?

I've been arguing with friends and am interested in how other climbers define benighted. Webster says something like being overtaken by darkness.

From a climbing perspective are you benighted if:

#1 Unplanned - you are on the 5th pitch of a six pitch climb, when darkness hits. You top out with headlamps and in epic fashion, take two hours to scramble back to your gear and another two to find your car when it should have taken only an hour from the top out to the car? If not, how many hours do you have to be out in darkness to qualify for a benighting?

I've always understood being benighted to mean simply that you climbed until the sun set and it became so dark that you were unable to find your way. Whether or not this made you stuck all night is just the degree of trouble it caused.

The poll idea was a good one. Having been down that route one too many times, I'd have to say it's getting stuck on a route after dark. I have had a number of situations where we decided to keep climbing after dark to get to our bivy spot.

I would say #2. If my buddy said to me, "Dude, we got benighted on this route and had to set up the rappel by headlamp, we got back to town at 7 PM and missed happy hour." I would be laughing pretty hard and calling him a pansy. I always figured it meant spending the night out unplanned although that isn't the dictionary definition. It's a climbing term now though!

I would say #2. If my buddy said to me, "Dude, we got benighted on this route and had to set up the rappel by headlamp, we got back to town at 7 PM and missed happy hour." I would be laughing pretty hard and calling him a pansy. I always figured it meant spending the night out unplanned although that isn't the dictionary definition. It's a climbing term now though!

While I agree that it would be silly to use the term if you just happened to have the sun go down as you're wrapping up, I disagree with the idea that the term must imply you spent the whole night out.

I would definitely use the term any time you weren't planning on being out after dark, and all of the possible solutions left after the sun goes down pretty much suck.

I've been in both the situation where I was able to continue to climb, top out, and get down, and the situation where I was not, and had to spend the night on a ledge. Honestly, I feared for my life more in the first situation (one headlamp, off-route, super-sketchy several-hour downclimb) than the second.